long travels, little sleep
Hey all
I’m now at Lithuania Christian College (LCC) in the computer lab. It’s been a crazy ride, totalling about 15 hours of traveling and then another 6 hours before we could sleep. The first flight from D.C. to Copenhagen was about 8 hours, and after a 5 hour layover we had a 1 hour flight from Copenhagen to Polanga, Lithuania. We met Wilma (not sure on the spelling, but pronounced Vihl-mah), who is in a way our LCC liaison of sorts, in the airport, and then we crammed into a small bus and made the 2 hour drive to Klaipeda where LCC is located. LCC is on the edge of a neigborhood that seems to be older than the fall of the USSR, and there are a number of extremely tall apartment buildings that seem to have very small apartments, and the buildings look more than 20 years old, thus leading me to think that they are from the Soviet era. LCC is growing, and we were excited to find that we are all staying in the new dorm, which is actually on campus, unlike the old dorm (which is still in use). We also met Zane (pronounced Zah-nah) in the Palanga airport, and she just completed her seconde year as a student here at LCC and is an assistant of sorts to Vilma.
After arriving at LCC we were assigned rooms in which to dump our stuff before our tour of the city began. I was placed on the 4th floor with the Resident Assistant (the CA to those at EMU), Oleg (spelling?) and his roomate Ross, whose full name I couldnt even pronounce correctly before he quickly told me to just call him Ross. I haven’t seen much of either roomates, and I don’t know if they will be taking classes with the EMU students or not.
We were given a few minutes to unpackand organize, but then we were ushered downstairs to the main lobby where we met to go on a tour of Klaipeda. The tour began with a brief run by of LCC as we left campus (which included a brief description of 2 buildings) and then we walked for a while through neigborhoods of apartments and houses working our way across the main railroad tracks out or the residential part of town. We were told not to walk alone after 8pm in this area, for LCC students had been mugged there before among other reasons, and if we did have to walk there to make sure it was in a good sized group. Sadly, here in Lithuania, one of the guys, Davo, has to be especially careful because he is African American. Lithuania is predominantly white and prejudice is much more common and accepted here. Hopefuly we won’t have any problems.
After crossing into the main part of town we talked about a few landmarks, the main one being the memorial for the author of the first book ever written purely in the Lithuanian language, and then found a great resturant at which I had potato pancakes with curds and salmon. Delicious! I also had Fanta to drink, and like expected, it was much better than soda in the US. We finished our meal and then bought bus tickets and took our first bus ride to the old part of town, where we walked around and found the square where Hitler gave his speech in Klaipeda. There is a statue of a girl in the squre, for which the square is named, and since the statue of the girl was facing away from where Hitler spoke, he ordered it torn down. the statue didn’t go back up until the fall of the USSR. We proceeded from the square to find another bus to the Acropolis, which is the main shopping mall in Klaipeda. It was mainly full of stores for women’s clothing and shoes, but there were a few spots that men could find things, the only one that I visited was the Nike store. Of course nothing was purchased there 
. We then proceeded to the giagantic grocery store that is in the Acropolis and bought our first meager rations that we will be living on for the next weeks. I bought bread, peanut butter, jelly, and yogurt (on Jerry’s recommendation). I will be eating light to say the least. We are on a 100 Lietuvos (Lehtoovohs) a week budget. The exchange rate is 1 dollar to 2.2 Lietuvos. It will be an interesting ride.
After our purchases we made our way back to LCC where we organized our rooms and slept. I was incredibly tired by this point, sleeping a total of an hour and a half during the travel to Lithuania, which meant I hadn’t slept more than an hour and a half in almost 30 hours. Yikes.
Well I must go eat lunch before we go on our way.
Mark
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